DenverUrbanism Bloghttps://denverurbanism.com
News, ideas, and commentary about urbanism in the Mile High CitySun, 19 Nov 2017 16:59:11 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.3It Is Time to Start Making Denver a City of Pedestrianshttps://denverurbanism.com/2017/11/it-is-time-to-start-making-denver-a-city-of-pedestrians.html
https://denverurbanism.com/2017/11/it-is-time-to-start-making-denver-a-city-of-pedestrians.html#respondSun, 19 Nov 2017 16:51:25 +0000https://denverurbanism.com/?p=26007

We’ve got to talk about walking in Denver. It’s dangerous, it’s oppressive, and it’s treated as an afterthought. You’ll laugh at my next words: “So I just came back from a two week vacation in Europe….” That’s how these things always start, right? Your friend tours some European capitals and now wants to upend the American way of life. I spent several days each in London, Paris, and Vienna. After coming back and seeing how incredibly easy it was to get around without a car in three different, bustling, global, modern cities I wasn’t surprised to be disappointed by my return to the kingdom of motordom.

The day after I returned home, I was almost flattened by someone exiting an alley at speed while I was walking to the grocery store and was blocked by a car taking up the whole crosswalk at an intersection, both within blocks of my home. This never happened in London, despite it being more crowded. It never happened in Paris, despite it being more chaotic. And it never happened in Vienna, despite its larger streets and the full size cars on display. Denver has talked about changing this paradigm but our actions have so far been timid and wanting.

Yesterday I got a haircut. My barber is down in the tech center while I work up in downtown but the trip is easy enough, a straight shot on the F Line down to Orchard Station. The first thing I noticed was that my train had been transformed into a billboard, a multi-billion dollar advertising platform, with obscured windows. It did not make me feel proud of our enormous investment in transit, and the ride was not improved by the blocked windows. On every train, bus, and even subway in Europe, the windows were never covered. Riders weren’t expected to put up with being enclosed in a darkened advertising platform, as if to say, “If you want dignity, get a car.”

Left photo (courtesy Wikimedia Commons): A light rail train in downtown Denver with windows covered by advertisements. Right photo (courtesy John Riecke): A London bus with advertisements that leave windows uncovered.

It was getting home that really convinced me though that Denver and RTD don’t do the minimum required to make walking a viable transportation option throughout the city. I’m not talking about making it easy or pleasant, I’m talking about practical. I live in Capitol Hill, so my phone told me to catch the next train going north and exit at the Louisiana-Pearl Station to catch the #12 bus. When I got off at Louisiana, I climbed the stairs from the highway-adjacent platform. Now, I’ve actually taken this trip before so I know where the connecting bus stop is, though it’s not obvious from the top of the stairs where you’re supposed to go.

In Europe, in completely unfamiliar cities, I was able to follow the large, clear, and helpful signs whenever I needed to make a transfer. Never once got lost. Denver? Not so much. But this time I knew where I was going and walked right over to the stop. I looked down the street for my bus. I checked my phone. Just missed it. The next one is scheduled to arrive in 25 minutes. One mistake and half an hour of your day is gone. You can do everything right and still be left in the lurch. That’s no way to run a transportation system that tens of thousands of people, indeed that the city as a whole, relies upon.

Left photo (courtesy Wikimedia Commons): Denver’s Broadway station offers no amenities for transit users. Right photo (courtesy John Riecke): Transit station in Vienna, Austria offers numerous retail and transit amenities.

New plan. Back on the train to Broadway, take the #0 bus up Lincoln. I don’t know if you’ve ever visited the I-25 & Broadway station before, but calling it a “station” is a bit generous. I stepped off the train at 6:30 PM on a weekday and was greeted by a giant empty parking lot next to a noisy highway. It’s got zero amenities. No place to buy a drink or a snack. No place to sit with a cup of coffee. Just a few, and I mean few, lonely benches waiting in a sea of concrete for a bus to, hopefully, eventually, come and pick up the riders cursed with transferring there.

I had no idea where to go, and I knew that if I missed my bus it would be a long time before another showed up. I walked around and found a sign, much too out of the way for such a large station, telling me the correct gate. It didn’t tell me where the gate was, but at least I knew it existed. I went to wait. How is it that in a large and growing city we still have thirty-minute headways for buses which run on major arterials during peak travel times? For two weeks all I had to do was step outside my hotel room and I was on my way in five minutes. Didn’t matter where I was going. Bus or train, local or across town, direct or transfer. It was LIBERATING. I never once worried about getting somewhere, being late, or wasting my day while the transportation system struggled to function.

Transit maps and wayfinding signs make it easy to navigate the London metro system. Photos courtesy John Riecke.

Finally got on my bus. Here’s where I noticed something else. While traveling through London, Paris, or Vienna, I would look out the window and see buildings, people, shops, life. While traveling through Denver I saw cars and parking lots. This is the city we’ve chosen to build. This is the city we present to our visitors. Parking lots. Wide roads filled with cars. People? Not so much. Buildings? Some, though often looking abandoned, battered by the force of traffic beating down their doors. Sometimes even physically turning their backs to the street, blank walls built as fortresses to keep out the noise and pollution. Depressing. Shops? Buried behind seas of empty cars, baking in the sun. Life? This is life?

But my story doesn’t end here. There’s still the walk from the bus stop to my home. At 9th and Grant, I was politely informed by a sign that the sidewalk was closed and that I should make two crossings, here and back at the end of the block. Let me tell you something: one time in London there was a sidewalk closure but no one was asked to cross any wide or busy intersections. There, a temporary sidewalk was provided where the street parking used to be. There were guard rails, there was high visibility paint on the curb, and there were honest-to-God flashing lights on the hand rails to warn motorists to watch out. Now that’s putting the safety and convenience of pedestrians front and center.

In Denver, pedestrians are forced to cross the street to navigate around fenced-off construction sites. In London, protected walkways with railings and flashing lights prioritize pedestrians around construction sites. Photos courtesy John Riecke.

The intersection at 9th and Washington is an offset one-way street. It has been designed so that cars never have to slow down from the 30 MPH posted limit. This is a busy intersection for people on foot, but the speed limit, the long view corridor which widens the street, and the wide curves of the curbs are all designed to move cars with literally no thought of protecting pedestrians. Simply speed and volume. I never felt as unsafe walking on European streets carrying much more traffic as I felt on 9th Avenue, hearing cars whoosh by. Crossing intersections I wondered if cars would bother to stop, if they would even have time to stop if they tried.

Pedestrians must cross Washington Street at 9th Avenue with no crosswalks or traffic controls to slow down speeding vehicles. Photos courtesy John Riecke.

Our city is built to accommodate cars, not people. It’s built to move and store cars, rather than allow people to live and move in safety. We even give away parking for free and insist that it be built into every new building, adding yet more cars to the streets. Our transit network is weak: infrequent and unpleasant. Our sidewalks exist in some places, but crossing the street on foot is still a game of Frogger. If we want a livable city, a walkable city, an economically strong city filled with happy people, we need to make the city work for people instead of their cars. We need to look to our peers. “Denver isn’t even New York or Chicago, much less London or Paris,” you might think. But we’ll never finish the race if we never start it. We need to look to our peers, not to say “We could never do that here,” but to say “We now have a goal.” It’s time to start making Denver a city of pedestrians.

Streets where pedestrians are prioritized in Vienna, Austria. A goal for Denver? Photos courtesy John Riecke.

Hey everyone! We haven’t had a Denver Urbanists MeetUp in a long time, so let do it!

Please join us for Denver Urbanists MeetUp #24!

When: Wednesday, November 29, 2017 starting at 5:30 PM
Where: Public School 303, 1959 Wewatta, one block from Union Station
Cost: Free

Our Denver Urbanists MeetUp is a great opportunity to meet people, build relationships, and bring your ideas and enthusiasm for how we can work together to continue moving Denver forward as a great urban city!

This is what you’ll do when you arrive: 1. Put on a name tag, 2. Get your own food/drink, 3. Chat. It’s that simple! Join us any time after 5:30 PM.

You don’t have to register to attend, but by RSVPing on our Eventbrite page, you’ll get on our mailing list and receive email notification for future meetups.

Sometimes a fairly small improvement can have a big impact on how friendly a street feels for bicycles and pedestrians.

For example, take the stretch of Larimer Street between the Auraria Campus and 14th Street. For years, Larimer has had one eastbound bus-only lane, two to three westbound vehicle lanes, narrow sidewalks, and no bike lanes, giving this stretch of Larimer Street a very automobile-dominant feel—a sad situation made even worse by the fact that it intersects with Speer Boulevard, a 10-lane monster that separates downtown from the Auraria Campus.

So today when I spotted some new improvements to this stretch of Larimer, it made me happy. The bus lane is gone (apparently RTD was no longer using it) and, rather than converting the bus lane to another travel lane for cars, it has been re-striped, bollards added, and converted to bicycle and pedestrian space. Way to go Denver Public Works!

The segment from 14th to the path through Creekfront Plaza leading to the Cherry Creek Trail is now a buffered bike lane. Here’s the new look as viewed from 14th Street and then back toward 14th Street:

The rest of the block over the bridge has been striped as a no-car zone. The sidewalk on the bridge over Cherry Creek is ridiculously narrow, so this no-car zone gives pedestrians more space and relief from feeling pinned against the bridge railing.

The pedestrian environment on the segment of Larimer in between the two directions of Speer has been similarly pitiful. Again we have a sidewalk that is far too narrow for the flow of people between downtown and the campus, and the adjacent ugly parking lot only adds insult to injury. Now, this stretch has also been striped as a no-car zone with bollards, as seen in the two images below:

Note to Public Works: you can get rid of that “Curb Lane – Buses Only” sign that is leaning into the pedestrian through zone.

These improvements are critical, given that Larimer is a major pedestrian corridor between the Auraria Campus and downtown, with thousands of students making the crossing every day during the school year. This important Downtown-Auraria link was identified as one of the seven Transformative Projects (“Connecting Auraria”) in the 2007 Downtown Area Plan.

But wait, it gets better! These improvements are good for the short-term, but a permanent fix may be coming. In the 2017 GO Bond transportation ballot measure that Denver voters will approve (I’m optimistic) in November is $7 million for “Larimer Bridge Reconstruction and Pedestrian Improvements.” Here’s the language from the GO Bond Projects Summary document:

This project will improve the pedestrian experience on Larimer between 14th and the Auraria Campus. Currently the sidewalks along the Larimer bridge over Cherry Creek are narrow (just 5’ on the south side) and do not support the high demand from pedestrians who regularly use Larimer to connect between Downtown and the campus. A full reconstruction of the bridge will allow a much wider structure (up to 88’) and accommodate a significantly larger pedestrian and amenity zone area. Funding will also help address the non-ADA compliant ramps that are currently located at the bridge approach and at two intersections where Larimer crosses north and southbound Speer. This is a significant challenge due to the current placement of both drainage and signal system infrastructure. Finally, this funding will allow for an upgrade to light fixtures, street furniture, planters, trees or other landscape improvements that could ultimately be maintained by the Auraria Higher Education Center.

Visionary is used to describe the process of thinking about or planning the future with imagination or wisdom. It’s often an overused word fraught with hyperbole—being described as visionary is a lofty title to live up to, but in the case of Urban Venture’s adaptive reuse project, Steam on the Platte, it feels rather fitting.

The vision behind Steam on the Platte, which DenverUrbanismintroduced to its readers in 2015, was originally conceived by Urban Venture’s President Susan Powers, whose redevelopment company is well-known in Denver for investing in diverse urban properties that catalyze community and spur value through adaptive reuse projects prioritizing workforce housing, healthy living and sustainable practices. Powers sees opportunity where others may only see frustration—for instance, her company is also developing a master-planned community on the site of a former convent—and Steam on the Platte is no exception.

The site is located at 1401 Zuni Street, in an area that for many decades has been considered a no-man’s land of Denver’s industrial past, despite being less than three miles southwest of downtown. Until recently, Steam on the Platte has remained one of the few undeveloped, large-scale sites in Denver where, despite burgeoning development infiltrating the rest of the city, has stood neglected and without a vision for its future. This would have remained the case if Urban Ventures—alongside its partners tres birds workshop, White Construction Group and Wenk Associates—had not charted a different course for this 3.2 acre site, which includes a 65,000 square foot industrial warehouse, 400 feet of frontage on the South Platte River, and a unique history rooted in industry and immigration.

Originally settled in the 1880s, the Steam on the Platte site housed 24 residences belonging to Colorado’s first Russian Jewish immigrants. Having immigrated to southern Colorado to pursue farming—an occupation unrealized in their homeland—the settlers then moved to the west side of Denver alongside the South Platte River, where other eastern European Jews resided. Over the years, the site became the location for many businesses that went up and then went under, which Urban Ventures tracked through the use of Sanborn fire insurance maps. For a period of years—until a flood in 1965 forced its closure—the site’s large industrial warehouse was run by a rabbi and used for a rag baling business, which consolidated scrap textiles from around the region and shipped them to far-reaching places like Africa and South America.

Steam on the Platte’s history since that point has been complicated—and likely to many developers—daunting. At different turns, some of the buildings have served as a truck stop and gas station, the squatting home for a motorcycle gang, and an off-the-radar site for illegal pot growing. To develop the site, the industrial warehouse had to be bought from a man in prison for real estate fraud. Its past uses also meant finding nine gas tanks underneath the property’s surface, alongside the threat of additional environmental assessments potentially turning up costly deterrents. Ultimately, would may have caused other developers to shy away from pursuing Steam on the Platte as a smart investment did not detract Powers. And in the year since redevelopment of the site has begun, you can see that removal of the rubble has revealed a gem hidden beneath the surface.

Phase I of the redevelopment began in 2016 and will be completed at the end of this summer. It involved tearing down three buildings that did not add character to the site; converting the interior of the industrial warehouse, the centerpiece of the redevelopment, to prepare for tenant leasing; removing paint from the brick buildings to reveal their natural surface; and developing a courtyard that ties the site together through natural integration with both the bank of the South Platte River as well as an iron bridge that carries RTD’s W Line from downtown to Golden.

For Powers, two focal points attracted her to the potential for this site. One was its location directly adjacent to the South Platte, and her recognition that few properties facing the river still remain available. She also believes the project will integrate with neighboring Sun Valley’s redevelopment by serving as one of the first commercial developments in the area, in addition to capitalizing on its close proximity to the Auraria campus and the growth seeping westward from downtown.

The primary vision for Steam on the Platte is as use for commercial office space, but with a dedication to tenants that reject traditional downtown office space in favor of the off-the-grid and creative built environment that the site provides. Powers says that prospective or committed tenants have been primarily in the tech and design industries, with additional uses to include a restaurant, a coffee shop/café run by a local non-profit, and potentially, condominiums and a hotel.

Walking through the interior of the warehouse, which will be home to 8-10 tenants, the site is reminiscent of other expertly-conceived, adaptively-reused buildings in Denver. There is an attention to original materials, such as timber and brick; emphasis on the robust natural lighting flooding through 24 skylights; and plentiful iron and metal work that consistently reminds one of the building’s history.

An original rag baling machine still sits at the center of the warehouse, and has been integrated with iron stairs that take a visitor to one of the building’s upper two floors. Other pieces of industrial machinery, rather than being removed, have been thoughtfully left in place to underscore work spaces and conference rooms. Glass walls are prevalent, allowing for the flow of natural light and a greater awareness for one’s surrounding space. Other details that are easier to miss but quietly tie the environment together—such as graffiti and ghost signs from previous businesses and building occupants, and walls covered in found object tiles–are discovered room by room.

At the entrance to the building’s construction site, a pile of found objects lays dormant but is being added to as new things are discovered. Objects are unearthed regularly, and have thus far included a hatchet head, glass medicine bottle, antique signage, glass door knob and whiskey bottles. Powers says the plan will be to display them at the entrance to the building so as to explain the history of the objects and their connection to the built environment.

While we sifted through the objects—some of which were unidentifiable in their use—one of the site’s construction managers adeptly commented that there are some stories that this building will never tell.

Tenants will begin occupying Steam on the Platte at the end of the month; remaining phases that include additional commercial office and residential space will take an additional three to four years to complete.

~~~

Camron Bridgford is a master’s candidate in urban and regional planning at the University of Colorado Denver, with a particular interest in the use and politics of public space as it relates to urban revitalization, culture and placemaking, and community development. She also works as a freelance writer to investigate urban-related issues and serves as a non-profit consultant.

This is the final post in a four-part series on Denver’s streetcar legacy and its role in neighborhood walkability. For the introductory post, click here. To get the most out of this post, I recommend taking a look at my app and selecting the Streetcar Neighborhood Walkability section in its sidebar.

Picking up where my last post left off, I wanted to see how the Streetcar Neighborhood Commercial Developments (SNCDs) affected the walkability of Denver’s neighborhoods. There are many ways to measure walkability but given my focus on SNCDs I wanted to focus on proximity to destinations that could conceivably be located in an SNCD. I came up with seven destination categories: retail, grocery stores, restaurants, services, convenience stores, entertainment, and schools/daycares. I used NAICS codes to download their locations from Esri Business Analyst.

So how did I measure proximity to these neighborhood destinations? I used a GIS technique called network analysis to answer the following question: how many destinations are located within a one-half mile sidewalk distance from each parcel in the city? I ran this analysis one destination category at a time and appended the results to each property parcel. Additionally, for each parcel, I added up the number of categories where at least one destination was accessible and called the metric “sum of categories”. All of this data curation and analysis was complex and time consuming, so I limited my area of study to a neighborhood in the northwest part of the city of Denver. I would eventually, however, like to expand it citywide.

The study area is divided into two tracts, a northern one and a southern one. The northern tract is much better provisioned with SNCDs than the one to the south. In its heart, it has an Exceptional Main Street and a Quality Cluster on W. 32nd Avenue and there are also more SNCDs just beyond its boundaries. The southern tract has only a Corner Store, and fewer SNCDs close by. There are also many business nearby both tracts on arterial roads, but neither tract has a major advantage in terms of access to them.

Below are the results. First is a series of maps, showing the number of destinations that each parcel can access. Second is a bar graph showing the average number of destinations accessible per parcel in the northern and southern tracts. It is clear that the parcels in the northern tract benefit from the increased presence of SNCDs. Every category except grocery and schools/daycares are better accessed on foot in the northern tract.

Top row from left to right: retail, grocery stores, restaurants, services. Bottom row from left to right: entertainment venues, convenience stores, schools/daycares, sum of categories.

It is likely that this picture looked significantly different during the heyday of the streetcar. Restaurants, retail, and services currently dominate the composition of the SNCDs, and you will notice that there are very few grocery stores. Small, “mom and pop” groceries were once much more prevalent but today, these have generally consolidated into auto-centric big box stores. Even so, as can be seen in my results, there is still plenty of value generated by the SNCDs. They bring many destinations and workplaces into close walking distance of residences and serve as valued neighborhood centers by the residents around them.

So that’s a wrap on the walkability analysis and this series of posts on my master’s capstone. Essentially the big theme of this project is that we can learn from our past and leverage its legacy to plan for a better, more multi-modal way of life. Denver was once a city without cars and people were able to get around just fine. They walked, they rode streetcars, and they went about their errands by patronizing local neighborhood shopping districts. Since that time the Denver metropolitan area, like the rest of the country, has grown to be more car oriented. The suburbs, where most people live today, were built around the car. You essentially need to own and operate this expensive, dangerous, multi-ton piece of machinery to go almost anywhere in these areas.

Denver proper fares better because of the legacy the streetcar left behind. Most of the city was developed before the automobile and despite the later intrusion of highways and the reconfiguration of streets to accommodate more cars, the inner city is built on a tight grid and its neighborhoods are more densely populated and mixed use. Not every neighborhood is a walking and transit paradise, but most of them have the bones to become one.

In this Story Map application, I have curated a lot of information about the history of Denver’s streetcars, their legacy in the form of pedestrian-friendly commercial districts, and the impact those districts have on the walkability of one of its neighborhoods. It is my hope that it presents Denver in a new light to many people and helps us get closer to the goal of creating a city where the car is no longer a necessity of life for the majority of its residents.

This is post number three in a four-part series on Denver’s streetcar legacy and its role in neighborhood walkability. For the introductory post, click here and for the second post, click here. To get the most out of this post, I recommend taking a look at my app and selecting the Streetcar Legacy section on the sidebar.

Just as cars and highways shaped the urban form of modern American metropolitan areas by encouraging dispersed patterns of development, a similar process occurred with the streetcar in the first half of Denver’s history. Denver once existed as a very compact city with development reaching only as far as the edges of the modern central business district. When the streetcar entered the picture, the footprint of the city began to expand along the streetcar routes. As late as 1933 (first three images below on left) the development of the city was tightly bound to the streetcar lines. The city existed as a grid of streets with rows of buildings clustered tightly about the streetcar lines, with open land only a few blocks beyond.

The difference between rail transit and highways lies in the degree of dispersion. With the streetcar, people had to walk to and from the stops. This naturally limited this distance that buildings could be built from the stops to no more than about a half mile, often less. With highways (below far right) this is not the case. When a motorist exits a highway, they continue to drive until they reach their final destination, where they can then almost always park on site. Walking is hardly a factor anymore, so development can spread farther from the highway without any travel time sacrifice.

So walking is part of any transit trip. You have to walk from your origin to the closest transit stop, and from the transit stop where you get off to your destination. This was daily life for most Denverites in the first half of the city’s history and the built environment was configured to facilitate this with a tightly gridded street pattern clustered about the streetcar lines. Additionally, commercial centers also developed on the same streets as the streetcar right-of-way. This allowed the people walking to and from the streetcars to purchase goods and services before continuing on their way.

These commercial nodes capitalized on the foot traffic generated by the streetcar to succeed. As a result, every neighborhood in the city had a vibrant commercial center and nearly every household in the city was within walking distance of most of their daily needs.

Today, the streetcars are gone, but many of these commercial centers remain. The most obvious examples are the continuous corridors on arterial streets like Broadway and Colfax, but they are also scattered on more neighborhood-oriented streets like South Pearl near Florida, Gaylord at Mississippi, and Tennyson at 41st. It is these neighborhood commercial nodes that are particularly special because they lack the noisy and dangerous automobile traffic of bigger streets, and are therefore more pleasant for the pedestrian. For my master’s capstone project, I mapped every single one of them.

There are no official terms that describes these developments that I could find in any academic or urban planning literature. Therefore I have come up with my own: Streetcar Neighborhood Commercial Development, or SNCDs for short. I define them as clusters or corridors of pedestrian-oriented commercial buildings (POCBs) located adjacent to an abandoned streetcar line on a road with fewer than four vehicle lanes. So let’s break down the term. The “streetcar” refers to how the buildings once depended on the people who rode the streetcar. The “neighborhood” means that they are neighborhood serving. Therefore, big arterial roads with four or more lanes are excluded. Finally, the “commercial development” refers to how the buildings must contain some sort of business, whether it is a store or an office.

So what is a pedestrian-oriented commercial building (POCB)? They are the kinds of commercial buildings which are clearly built with pedestrian access in mind. Again I came up with my own criteria based on the patterns I saw in the buildings and defined them as two grades:

Grade One POCB: A commercial building built up to the sidewalk with no off-street parking setback. Side parking and lawns must consume less than 40% of the lot. Rear parking must not be larger than double the building footprint (below left).

Grade Two POCB: A commercial building with a sidewalk to building entrance parking setback less than the length of the building starting from the main entrance (below middle).

All other buildings are AOCBs, or automobile-oriented commercial buildings (below right).

While mapping them, I soon found that SNCDs come in many shapes and sizes. Because of this, I also decided to classify them based on their size, their provision of POCBs, and their health. I came up with six categories, shown in the text and images below. Going down the text corresponds to the images from left to right…

Exceptional Main Street: These SNCDs have a historic main street feel and consist of an approximately 600+ foot street segment with Grade One POCBs covering at least 75% of the street frontage on both sides.

Quality Cluster: More of a cluster than a corridor, these have > 75% of their street frontage lined with Grade One POCBs, but are not large enough to qualify for “main street” designation.

Mixed Main Street: These are large corridors, but have more automobile oriented buildings, Grade Two POCBs, and/or parking lots mixed in, causing the percentage of Grade One POCBs to fall below 75%.

Mixed Cluster: Same logic. Like a Mixed Main Street, but not large enough.

Corner Store: Any isolated POCB which contains multiple businesses. I did not account for those which only contain one business because they are harder to locate.

Degraded: SNCDs where most of the buildings are vacant, have been torn down, or have been converted to residential uses. This is not comprehensive, and there are certainly many more. In the final image below, you can see modern day Old West Colfax. It was once entirely lined with buildings, but now only a few remain, replaced by parking lots.

If you made it this far, I think you would benefit by looking at my application. The locations of all the SNCDs are mapped out and I have included additional goodies like information about the parcels contained within each one and links to Google Street View imagery. You can also access that 1933 aerial of the entire city.

Having mapped the location of every SNCD in Denver, I wanted to know how they affect the walkability of the neighborhoods in which they are situated. In the next and final post of the series, I will present an analysis of this in one of Denver’s neighborhoods.

This is post number two in a four part series on Denver’s streetcar legacy and its role in neighborhood walkability. For the introductory post, click here. To get the most out of this post, I recommend taking a look at my app and examine the Streetcar Routes section. This will allow you to look at every streetcar route that ever existed in the modern city proper and filter them using a time slider to see what routes existed during any given year.

Once upon a time, there were no cars in Denver. In 1861, when the city was incorporated, people traveled around town either by foot or by horse. By 1870 the town had grown to a population of about 4,700 people and became large enough to make walking from one side to the other time consuming. Not everybody had the luxury of getting around by their own private or hired horse. In 1872 the Denver Horse Railroad Company built the first public transit line in Denver. It consisted on a horse drawn rail carriage going from Auraria to modern Curtis Park.

By 1880 the trackage had expanded modestly, perhaps doubling in total length, covering an area from Broadway at Speer to Larimer at 33rd going north-south, and Federal to Ogden going east-west. The population in this time however had ballooned seven-fold to 35,000. News reports at the time lamented the inadequate state of the network. In the face of pent-up demand and continued population growth, the 1880s saw the biggest single-decade expansion of the network in its 78-year history.

By 1890, when the population tripled to 106,000, nearly every block in downtown and modern Five Points/RiNo had a streetcar line. Lines covered the full length of Broadway and Colfax, and the northwest side around Berkeley had multiple routes. These lines were built by many fiercely competitive startup companies. Competition was so intense, that on occasion one company would rip up the rails of another while building their own!

New means of conveyance also appeared. Many of the new routes were cable cars (below left). Driven by a central powerhouse, miles of sunken cables moved along next to the tracks, which the cable cars latched onto for propulsion. Additionally, steam engine streetcars were also built, including one which went out to the newly relocated University of Denver campus. In the early 1890s the electric streetcar came on the scene, powered by overhead wires (below right). By the time of the economic Panic of 1893, they had become dominant. The Denver Tramway Company owned the bulk of these superior electrified lines, and was thus better positioned than its competitors.

When I first set out on this digitization project, I wanted to record the means of conveyance of each line. I found this to be impossible however because the network was simply too dynamic and too complicated with all these different companies operating. Oftentimes one street would have multiple companies operating multiple tracks, each with a different propulsion mechanism. I had assumed that the network was operated by one company and grew in an orderly fashion over the streetcar’s whole history. How wrong I was!

The recession in 1893 largely brought a halt to street railway expansion, and ushered in an era of consolidation. Companies merged, and redundant lines were taken out of service. By the new century the Denver Tramway Company emerged with a monopoly on streetcar service operation in Denver. Expansion picked up again in the early 20th century, but at a much slower pace. By this time automobiles had become affordable to a large swath of the population and the Tramway became aware of the threat it posed.

In 1915 they commissioned an interesting survey of the mode share of people traveling in and out of the central business district. 51% rode streetcars, 38% walked, 13% drove automobiles, 6% rode bicycles, 1% drove motorcycles, and 1% used horses. They also found that compared to 1914, streetcar patronage had dropped by 9% and driving had doubled. However in subsequent years the raw numbers of streetcar patronage again increased.

It was around 1917 that the streetcar system reached its peak in terms of coverage (below) with the construction of a line to Barnum. After this was a long decline, with many lines being taken out, and the last new segment being built in 1923. Looking at ridership itself, it peaked in 1910, with 87,819,000 passengers. At the time, 3,000 automobiles were present in the city. By 1928, the number of private automobiles had increased to 78,000 and streetcar ridership declined by 59%.

The late 1920s and early ’30s marked the beginning of the conversion of many rail routes to bus routes but, as in the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression put a stop to this, stabilizing the rail system until 1940. At this time, trolley coaches, which are essentially buses powered by overhead electric wire, along with gasoline buses, began replacing some of the less heavily used streetcar routes. This conversion process didn’t last long though, ending with the removal of rail tracks on 16th Street in July of 1941, because soon the United States became party to World War Two after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Gasoline and rubber were rationed due to the war effort, causing ridership to increase for the last time, and the system again remained stable until the end of the war in 1945.

After the war the economy boomed and a huge push for modernization in all aspects of life occurred. Many Denverites regarded the streetcars as ancient, noisy, and obsolete. With the advent of larger diesel buses, the removal of the streetcar lines accelerated, and the plurality in terms of transportation mode share that the streetcar had enjoyed since the late 1800s came to an end. By 1951, all streetcar lines were gone and the Denver Tramway became an all bus and trolley coach operation. The electric trolley coaches themselves were taken out of service in 1955.

In the first half of Denver’s history, public transportation in the form of streetcars was the dominant mode of travel that people used to get around. Because of this, most of the city proper was built around these lines. In our next post, we will take a look at how the built environment developed in symbiosis with the streetcars, and how that legacy remains with us today.

~~~

The images of the first horsecar route, the trolley bus, and the color streetcar are from Denver’s Street Railways Volumes I and II. If you are interested in the history of Denver’s streetcars, I highly recommend taking a look at these books, as they are filled with fantastic images and a brilliant historical narrative. They served as my primary data source for the route mapping, along with most of the information in this post. The remaining non-map images are courtesy of Denver Public Library Digital Collections.

Many people, even some longtime residents of the city, would be surprised learn that Denver once had a world-class public transportation system in the form of streetcars. These street railways existed for 78 years of the city’s history and once densely covered a large portion of the modern city proper. Below is a map (source) of the system in 1913.

Although long gone today, evidence abounds of the streetcar’s presence in the city, mainly in the form of old commercial strips lining arterials like Colfax and Broadway, and embedded in neighborhoods on streets like South Pearl (below left) and Tennyson. This legacy in the built environment is not only valuable for its history and aesthetic. It also contributes to the walkability of Denver’s neighborhoods. Because these developments are scattered in close proximity to residences, more people are within walking distance to many types of businesses and services than they would otherwise be, as seen in the map (below right) of northwest Denver.

As a master’s student studying GIS (geographic information science) at the University of Denver, I recently completed a capstone project that focuses on this subject matter. Over the next couple of weeks, I will post several articles about the results of this project and the interactive web mapping application that I built for it. For this first post, I provide some background on how I came to focus on this topic for my master’s capstone…

I left car-dependent suburban Indianapolis where I grew up to attend graduate school here in Denver. I had a vague idea to use GIS to study something relating to urban sustainability, but I wasn’t sure what exactly. So I delved into the academic literature and soon came upon the subject matter that has become my driving passion to the present day: the negative externalities of cars and the role that the urban built environment plays in influencing our transportation mode choices.

I learned that the sprawling development patterns of most American cities (see Google image below), with their low densities, segregated land uses, and poor pedestrian design are directly responsible for the vast majority of Americans needing to drive everywhere. This has resulted in many very poor outcomes for the well-being of our urban communities. Over 35,000 people died in car accidents and over 2 million were injured in 2015, resulting in an annual economic impact of over 200 billion dollars in medical costs and property damage. Cars are also implicated in our outrageous obesity rates because they facilitate inactive lifestyles, their tailpipes spew pollution and contribute to global climate change, they cause tremendous noise pollution, and they erode community social capital by preventing social encounters in the public domain.

Urban municipalities all over the country, including Denver have recognized this and have set goals to reduce our excessive level of automobile dependency. After exploring various potential directions that I could take based on the academic literature that deals with these issues, I decided to change paths and seek a client for my project instead. I found a planner at Denver’s Community Planning and Development department named Andrew Rutz who was interested in working with students. He was curious about the pleasant, pedestrian friendly commercial corridors I mentioned earlier and having me do a GIS project around that. I really liked the idea and ran with it.

I proposed to focus on three related themes: the actual streetcar routes, the legacy of the streetcar in the built environment, and the impact of that legacy on neighborhood walkability. I planned to do a great deal of GIS digitization and analysis on these topics, and then host the results on an interactive web mapping application, viewable to the public, called an ESRI Story Map.

In the upcoming posts, I am going to delve into each of these three related concepts. By clicking on the link below, you can open the Story Map application. A map dominates the right side of the screen, and a sidebar is present on the left. The sidebar has three sections that control the content of the map. Under each section header are text and pictures that explain the map under consideration.

Streetcar Routes: This section displays every streetcar route that ever existed in the city of Denver. By using the time slider, you can see how the network was configured year-by-year, from the first horsecar line in 1872 to the last streetcar lines in 1950.

Streetcar Legacy: This section maps every Streetcar Neighborhood Commercial Development, a concept of my own devising, in the modern city of Denver.

Streetcar Neighborhood Walkability: This takes a look at a northwest Denver neighborhood to see how Streetcar Neighborhood Commercial Developments impact the ability of residents to access their day to day destinations on foot.

For this introductory post, I will just leave the application here for you to explore on your own. In the next three posts, I will delve into each section in more detail and explain why any of this matters. Next up will be the Streetcar Routes.

~~~

Featured image at top, courtesy of Denver Public Library Digital Collections. View of 16th and Arapahoe (1911). Source.

]]>https://denverurbanism.com/2017/08/denver-streetcar-legacy-and-its-role-in-neighborhood-walkability.html/feed11Supporting Solutions for the Future or Fixing the Mistakes of the Past?https://denverurbanism.com/2017/06/supporting-solutions-future-fixing-mistakes-past.html
https://denverurbanism.com/2017/06/supporting-solutions-future-fixing-mistakes-past.html#commentsFri, 09 Jun 2017 15:19:51 +0000http://denverurbanism.com/?p=25786

The upcoming general obligation bond proposal is a tremendous opportunity for Denver. It will ask an important question beyond simply, “Do we want shiny new stuff?” It will also ask the voters, “How are we going to pay for our city?” Namely, will we make strategic investments to increase efficiency and capacity or will we use our once-a-decade bond issue to catch up on deferred maintenance?

There are arguments to be made on both sides of the issue. Catching up on deferred maintenance is definitely important. Rough streets are hard on cars and make driving more expensive and less convenient. Buildings needing basic repairs deteriorate more quickly than ones in good repair. City parks with broken sprinklers, dying trees, or broken playground equipment make it difficult to enjoy our community green space. But while these things should be brought to a state of good repair, I argue that spending bond money doing so would be an example of waste: not just a waste of opportunity but also a waste of money.

While spending money on maintenance is important, spending bond money on maintenance means we’re paying interest on every dollar we spend. Bond interest, though low, is still interest, and a dollar borrowed today will cost us two dollars by the time it’s paid off in 2028. So if we pay for maintenance out of our yearly budget instead of using bond money, we could fund just as much maintenance for half the amount of money. Paying for overdue maintenance out of bond funds shows bad governance: a government and citizenry that won’t commit to funding routine maintenance—when needed—out of the annual budget. Good urbanists should reject this kind of fecklessness.

As good urbanists, we shouldn’t just repair what has already been built in the current form, we should rebuild it to be more useful, to allow more people to live more comfortably in our city. If we want our transportation infrastructure to be used more efficiently, that is, if we want it to produce more wealth and a healthier city in all senses of the word, then we need to invest in projects which upgrade that infrastructure, not ones that maintain the status quo. Simply repaving or rebuilding will only get us back to square one. We need to get ahead of square one, by investing our bond funds in projects which will move more people in more sustainable ways to where they need to go. Catching up on maintenance can, by definition, only move the same amount of people at the same speed and, remember, at twice the price.

We want Denver to continue to thrive, and so we should be investing for the future, not just catching up with the mistakes of the past. We should be spending money in a way that will make a difference in the way our city runs, indeed in our neighbors’ lives. And so we need your help. Yes, you! Call your councilperson. Write them an email. Talk to them in person and tell them that, while maintenance is important, we must do better than tread water: we must move Denver towards a better future. And while you’re at it, tell them to start fully funding maintenance every year, through the regular budget process, so that the next time a bond issue rolls around we can dream even bigger and truly be proud of our beautiful and bustling city.

In 2012, Denver’s Civic Center Park became the city’s first National Historic Landmark. It has a lot to brag about. Built under Mayor Robert W. Speer (yes, that Speer), the park offers pristine structures and plenty of green space in an iconic location at the heart of downtown right next to the Colorado Capitol and the City and County of Denver building. It epitomizes the City Beautiful movement which can trace its popularity to the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair, where Mayor Speer got the idea to construct the park. The only problem? Something was already there.

In fact, there were a lot of somethings there. The capitol building was constructed in the 1890s, although the historic dome wouldn’t be finished until 1908. There was also the McNichols Civic Center Building, which opened in 1907 as a Carnegie Library. In addition to these structures, there were two full city blocks filled with shops, homes, and other buildings. Early maps tell quite a story. Across the street from the capitol there were businesses of all kinds. A cigar factory was located on Broadway, as was an ice cream factory. Hotels dotted the area. A school of art was off the alley between Broadway and S. Fifteenth Street, which continued directly south and paralleled Broadway before the park was built. It is now Acoma Street. On Cortland Street, which ran east/west between Colfax and 14th Avenue and no longer exists, there was a livery and several houses, and a drug store held a piece of prime real estate on the southwest corner of Colfax and Broadway.

Below are scans of two early maps showing the blocks between Bannock Street (labeled as S. Fourteenth) and Broadway, from Colfax to 14th Avenue, where Civic Center Park is today. The first image shows cropped parts from Sheets 6 and 20 of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from 1890, courtesy of the University of Colorado Boulder Library. Colfax Avenue wouldn’t be curved around the park for nearly thirty more years. The second image shows a cropped part of Plate 13 from the Baist Real Estate Atlas and Surveys of Denver from 1905. As can be seen in the 1890 map, a boarding house once stood at the southeast corner of Colfax and Bannock. By the 1905 map, the Carnegie Library (today’s McNichols Building) was shown.

In 1904, Mayor Speer was elected to the office for the first of three terms. He immediately proposed plans for a civic center park, and some projects started. A plan to extend 16th Street to the capitol building was called for but defeated. By 1912, nothing had happened, and Mayor Speer lost reelection, thus killing the plan… until Mayor Speer won his third term in 1916. Work on the park began immediately and everything between Broadway, Bannock, Colfax, and 14th Avenue was razed.

Below are photos of today’s McNichols Building, the only building on the two city blocks that survived, and the Civic Center Park’s ample green space and many monuments.

By 1917, Mayor Speer and the City of Denver had their park. This beautiful park connected the Colorado Capitol building to…nothing. The City and County Building didn’t begin construction until the mid-1920s, and Mayor Speer, who spent nearly 15 years championing the park, passed away from the flu in 1918.

Today, the park offers great views of the Colorado State Capitol and the City and County of Denver Building. The streets around the park are often closed for festivals and events, allowing pedestrians to roam freely around the neighborhood.

Had Denver forgone Civic Center Park, there is no telling what might be there now. The benefits of the park can easily be seen, with the Library, the Art Museum, and the Colorado Supreme Court all adjacent to it. Nonetheless, many of the homes and buildings that were torn down would now be considered historic landmarks of their own, but only if they survived the backhoe in the 1960s and 1970s when Denver tore down half of downtown in the name of urban revival.

The Cinco da Mayo Festival is one of many events which are held in and around the park throughout the year. The Voorhies Memorial serves as the north entrance to the park and as the gateway to Downtown Denver.

Now the park offers plenty of space and panoramic views. The blocks to the west of the park have become a government center and, to the south of the park, multiple museums and the main branch of the Denver Public Library offer a lot for residents and visitors to enjoy.

~~~

Kyle Dobbins is a resident of Capitol Hill and, after teaching music for three years, he studied urban geography at CU Denver. Originally from the Columbus, Ohio area, he moved to Denver in 2012 after living in Wyoming for six years. His focus is on transportation planning and historical urbanism. He teaches music for Denver Public Schools and has remained active in the urban planning community in Denver.